Search Results

“... a negative condition into a positive possibility. ‘I have nothing to say and I am saying it,’ John Cage wrote in 1949; two decades later Nauman said, in effect, ‘I have nothing to do and I am doing it.’ Although this formulation isn’t as dire as ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on,’ Nauman does share with Samuel Beckett (another early influence) a ...”

“... smiling, ironic’, the best-dressed of the party; Tariq Ali with ‘lustrous brown eyes’ but (Inglis claims) ‘a bit out of it all’. As a narrative device it is brilliant, setting the scene for what is to be a bleak story, introducing some of the leading characters, and insinuating that the author was eyewitness to an intimate ...”

“... paying the highest price in the loss of the lives of our young soldiers – almost alone. I’m John Kerry and I approved this message. In a world of instant projections and medium-is-the-message contemplations, commentary on the presidential race of 2004 might finish right there: Kerry’s style is downbeat, America-blaming, slightly depressing, while the ...”

“... but I am with you. After a routine summons to self-sacrifice – ‘whether we are black or brown or white, we all bleed the same red blood of patriots’ – he unleashed the maxim that will guide his policy: From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first, America first. Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign ...”

“... teens, C.R.W. Nevinson fancied the life of a bohemian and attention-grabber. His idol was Augustus John, king of the Café Royal, and, in 1908, he decided to go to the Slade, as John had done. There he knocked around with Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler and Edward Wadsworth in the Slade Coster Gang. They went to music ...”

“... this prosopographical approach to sanctity has become more and more popular. The American scholar John Mecklin studied the saint as a ‘culture type’ in 1941. In his book Altruistic Love (1951), the Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin refined Coulton’s analysis by investigating the social origins of some three thousand saints. He concluded that ‘the ...”

“... Venice is an elegant and distinguished first book. Like its predecessor The Rise to Empire, John Julius Norwich’s The Greatness and the Fall has the modest aim of providing ‘a straightforward record of the main political events of Venetian history, for the general non-academic reader’. This second volume takes the story from 1405 to 1797, from the ...”

“... the pay rise of nurses ‘need a sharp blast with an enema tube’. ‘FAT CAT gas boss Cedric Brown’ and other ‘overpaid bosses’ of privatised utilities have also come under fire: ‘If the pigs put their noses much deeper in the trough, they’ll suffocate.’ Disdain for the royal ne plus ultra of Britain’s class hierarchy has long been ...”

“... cliché, echoed privately by the Shadow Chancellor and one-time Mandelson intimate, Gordon Brown, that Mandelson is Labour’s real deputy leader. His grip on strategy and policy direction, as well as campaigning and presentation, is increasingly tight. When Mandelson mutters that he is unhappy, say, with Labour plans to abolish compulsory competitive ...”

“... told, the victory against Jim Crow began with the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that racially segregated schools were constitutionally impermissible. The grassroots movement for civil rights became visible in 1955, when blacks in Montgomery, Alabama boycotted the city’s public transport system after Rosa Parks ...”

“... While John Kasarda shares the title page of this scientific romance masquerading as a work of urban theory, Aerotropolis was written by Greg Lindsay alone. Kasarda, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s business school, may be a peculiar sort of Johnson, but Lindsay, a business journalist, is nonetheless his committed Boswell ...”

“... this shift, occasionally making things worse. Just before our gathering, the zombie chieftain John Howard had delivered a refulgent message of thanks on TV, making it plain his new government would turn first to workplace legislation. The aim would be reform in the interest of small business – boosting enterprise by making hiring and firing much ...”

“... the head inspires discussions of mental illness, hairstyles, beheading, and the rival relics of John the Baptist’s head. Under the rubric of skin, Hartnell ad-dresses flaying, leprosy, plastic surgery, racial difference and manuscripts – for, as others have pointed out, most of what we know about the premodern past is written on the skins of dead ...”

“... overshadowed by a sale of Impressionist art at Christie’s, and almost escaped the attention of John Maynard Keynes, a Newton enthusiast. As it was, Keynes missed most of the lots, and shortly after the auction set about clawing back papers from successful bidders. Most of what he recovered concerned alchemy. On his death in 1946, Keynes bequeathed what is ...”

“... predictable, the first is not. Tradition has it that it was in or on Patmo or Patmos that St John the Divine saw the Apocalypse – a Greek word meaning the disclosure of long-term planning or the shape of things to come. Now there is much in St John’s Revelation that I would like to talk about, but I will confine ...”